6of 9Ketch Secor is the lead singer/fiddler for Old Crow Medicine Show.Photo: Courtesy photo

7of 9Singer-songwriter Tom RussellPhoto: Shout Factory

8of 9Jeff Tweedy

9of 9Bob Dylan won an Oscar for his song “Things Have Changed.”Photo: Sony

Bob Dylan rolls in this weekend, though he’ll be far west of Bagby and Lamar, the intersection he namechecks in “If You Ever Go to Houston.”

Dylan, who will be Sugar Land Sunday, is a curious creative character in that he offers information more than answers. There’s a lot to be said for some opacity in art. Sure, it’s easier to simply let the mystery remain in place. But sometimes it’s worth following crumb trails. The text that follows is pulled from nearly 20 years of interviews with other musicians and arranged in a loose chronological order tied to Dylan’s career. I wasn’t talking to any of these people specifically for a story about Dylan. Such is his standing in songwriting that he just comes up in conversation with other songwriters.

As Houston native and songwriter, Beaver Nelson once said to me, “Even his records that you talk about being bad, I just love them all because I’m fascinated by the man and the way he thinks. Why would you just say, ‘That’s a load of crap?’ instead of asking, ‘Why would someone who wrote ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ write ‘Wiggle Wiggle’?”

Bob Dylan

Dylan was born in Duluth, Minn., in 1941, and raised in Hibbing, a small town to the northwest rich in iron ore.

“I think about Bob growing up in this mining town with an AM radio by the bed. It sounds like Butcher Holler (Loretta Lynn’s hometown). Or Sledge, Miss. (home of Charley Pride). Or other places in the country music road map, where a musician hears something that turns them on, and then the dream begins.”

— Ketch Secor, singer/fiddler in Old Crow Medicine Show. Secor and OCMS took an old Dylan song fragment and created new verses for the hit song “Wagon Wheel.”

“He was the first major songwriter who transformed the folk music that I was into. When I had a day off, I drove to Hibbing where he grew up. It looked like a 1948 movie set. It astounded me that he came out of there. This Jewish kid whose father owned a hardware store, who reinvented himself as he did. That he didn’t come out of New York or Los Angeles astounded me.”

— Tom Russell, whose song “Mesabi” is about Dylan’s Minnesota childhood and a sense of shared escape through music.

IN NEW YORK TOWN

Dylan dropped out of college and moved to New York in 1961 to find his hero, folk singer Woody Guthrie, who at that point was hospitalized and deep in the throes of Huntington’s disease. Dylan sunk roots into the city’s folk scene and caught the ear of producer John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records. “Bob Dylan,” released in March 1962, included two Dylan originals. Dylan wrote almost all the songs on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” released the next year. Among the songs he wrote: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”

Once, I asked Stevie Wonder if there was one song he wished he’d written. “‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’” he said. “I think it’s a great lyric. And timeless.”

“He was never better than he was on those first two or three records. He wrote differently then.”

— Randy Newman

“I fell in with punk rock, but the punk movement was just about making change. It wasn’t a complaint list. So I think it had a lot in common with artists like Woody Guthrie and Dylan. They had the same spirit in ’em.”

— Mike Ness, Social Distortion

NEW VISIONS

Many fans point to 1965-66 as peak Dylan, starting with “Bringing It All Back Home” and running through “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde.” As he expanded his sound, he lost some folk enthusiasts (and, apparently, Randy Newman) but this era set a template for subsequent generations of muse-chasing artists.

“I guess if I had to pick a favorite song, it’d be ‘Visions of Johanna.’ It’s like every time I hear it, there’s a new line that gets me. But ‘the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.’ I wish I made that up.”

— Todd Snider, singer-songwriter

“Artists have always evolved with their art, but in music it didn’t really happen until Dylan appeared. Since then, we’ve all just been creating these sub-Dylan worlds”

— Robyn Hitchcock, singer-songwriter

“The wellspring for what we do is Dylan. He invented a lot of what we do all these years later. He was like a magpie: He collected these things and made a collage. And he still does it to this day.”

— Stan Ridgway, singer-songwriter

“The only other person who has been on both worlds is Leonard Cohen. He was a poet who preferred to be a songwriter. He was a pretty damned good poet, and a great songwriter. Dylan’s stuff does hold up on page, but it’s not poetry per se. But he knows a lot about poetry for sure. Imposing music and rhyme and some extra mystery. … It’s a mystical thing, a magical thing. You can listen to a great song forever, whether it’s something from the early-’50s or a Sinatra song or ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ It’s like a painting, you can enjoy it forever. Whereas a poem doesn’t have that capability. You’re not going to read ‘The Wasteland’ every day, even though it’s great. But if you had a Van Gogh in the front room, you could be happy to enjoy it every day. And listening to ‘Highway 61’ is the same thing.”

— Tom Russell

NEW MORNING

Dylan opened the 1970s by confounding the faithful: A record of interpretations of songs written by others that he titled “Self Portrait.” It wasn’t terribly well received. Some of his ’70s albums are widely revered (“Blood on the Tracks”), some are sentimental favorites for listeners (“New Morning”) and others aren’t much loved at all (“Slow Train Coming”).

“I always thought ‘Self Portrait’ was an interesting record. It doesn’t contain stuff he himself wrote. But it was interesting for that reason. He was always a great interpreter.”

— David Bromberg, guitarist on “Self Portrait”

“I like ‘New Morning.’ It had a soothing sound to me. He sounds happy in there. I bought it when I was young and never liked it. It was the last one to fall for me. But now it’s one of my favorites. How much better to be in love? Why be Bukowski when you can be in love with a woman and lying by a creek?”

— Todd Snider

“I read that Dylan has written completely different verses for songs like ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ and ‘Isis.’ That’s interesting and brave. I’m just too lazy to do that.”

— Robert Earl Keen, singer-songwriter

INFIDEL

The ’80s for Dylan were kind of like the ’70s but without a real classic record or three to his credit. He put out seven albums, all of which got mixed receptions. A few have, over the years, developed followings.

“My first record was ‘Infidels.’ I got it for Christmas when I was maybe 13. So I came in with the Zionist Bob Dylan at the Wailing Wall in a yarmulke Jewish rocker man guy. So much of your listening impression is formed by where you’re standing when you first hear something. … When my father first played ‘Blonde on Blonde’ I didn’t like it one bit. I thought the harmonica was too loud.”

— Ketch Secor

MODERN TIMES

Dylan opened the ’90s with “Under the Red Sky,” regarded by some as one of his worst records, and closed the decade with “Time Out of Mind,” which initiated a second golden age. He’s been on a roll since, sweeping up glowing reviews, slavish think-pieces and a sort of living-legend status. “Love and Theft” from 2001 and “Modern Times” from 2006 were treated with affinity mirroring that of his 1965-66 work. “When Dylan put out ‘Modern Times’ I was on a houseboat,” said Todd Snider. “I listened to it one time and got my lyric book and threw it in the lake.”

Over the past three or four years, Dylan has released albums of old American standards, leaving “Tempest” from 2012 as his most recent set of originals.

“I like all of his records. I find something to enjoy in about everything he’s done. ... Dylan was a major force to me. Because I knew I couldn’t be Bob Dylan, but I could push myself to make a different record each time. His albums, and the Beatles, even the Clash and the Meat Puppets and the Replacements. Each record felt like a progression to me. That’s Dylan to me.”

— Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco

“He’s my favorite American. I love everything about him. I never get tired of him. If you listen to all the (expletive) people say he sucks, well, I don’t agree. He doesn’t have a record I don’t like. I bought a recording of him talking to a guy on the phone, having an argument. That was worth my money. This guy was going through his garbage and he got on the phone with the guy and got into an argument. I paid $20 for it. To me it’s just another great album by Bob Dylan.”

— Todd Snider

“He was obviously gifted with ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ and ‘Gates of Eden.’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ Those are gifted things. Then you get older, move along and wander in the wilderness, though, and you come back with wisdom. ‘Time Out of Mind’ has wisdom in its poetry. And I like to go back to ‘Infidels.’ There’s so much in that record for me. I love the early period in Dylan’s career, but I’m awestruck by the later work. You can see the mind of the artist working This idea that, ‘It doesn’t come every day, so now I’m going to work.’”

Andrew Dansby covers music and other entertainment, both local and national, for the Houston Chronicle, 29-95.com and chron.com. He previously assisted the editor for George R.R. Martin, author of "Game of Thrones" and later worked on three "major" motion pictures you've never seen. That short spell in the film business nudged him into writing, first as a freelancer and later with Rolling Stone. He came to the Chronicle in 2004 as an entertainment editor and has since moved to writing full time.